1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to cooking ware, particularly a pan for roasting large food items.
2. Description of Related Art
In the matter of roasting large comestibles such as turkeys, beef roasts, loins, and other large cuts of meat, prior art teaches two main approaches. The first entails a wire rack on which the roasting food sits elevated above a holding pan which collects run-off fat and cooking liquids, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,848,217 to Koziol (1989). The second approach entails a disposable pan of light-weight metal, such as thin-gauge aluminum, wherein the roasting food sits on the bottom of the pan, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,969,569 to Anders (1990). Each approach is marked by disadvantages both particular and common.
The rack-and-pan approach keeps the food well above the fat and juices, allowing for a healthful and evenly roasted product. But it requires the inconvenience and labor of thoroughly washing both rack and pan. Even when the rack and pan are coated with non-stick material, the task of thoroughly cleaning the rack and pan remains.
Although the disposable pan approach offers the advantage of minimal clean-up and avoids the potential health hazard of hard-to-eliminate food remaining in the creases between the rack ribs and the rack frame, it suffers from the health disadvantage that the roasting food sits in the run-off fat and results also in only partial roasting of the bottom of the food. In order to solve these problems, U.S. Pat. No. 3,958,504 to Levin (1976) attempts to create the equivalent of rack-like elevations by means of bosses or other extrusions above the planar bottom of the pan. But these efforts create only a poor simulacrum of a true rack, since the thin aluminum that allows for the disposability and low cost of the pan, does not allow for bosses or other elevations to be high enough to create a rack that spaces the food well above the fat. U.S. Pat. No. 3,640,209 to Wilson (1972) segregates a cooking item from run-off fat, but is limited to the process of broiling. This method entails relatively light-weight, flat cuts of meat, such as steaks, chops, or hamburger, for which a flat cooking surface is adequate and may be accommodated by a thin-gauge disposable pan. Roasting, on the other hand, entails relatively large, heavy, and ovoid fowl or meats such as turkeys or roasts. These do not easily rest stably on a flat surface to present an optimum orientation for cooking, for example, breastdown when roasting a turkey. U.S. Pat. No. 5,503,062 to Buff (1996) provides a nondisposable frame for supporting a roasting item elevated above run-off fat in a disposable pan, but requires thorough washing and cleaning, thus limiting the convenience of this approach. U.S. Pat. No. 4,186,217 to Tchack (1980) requires laying down a sheet of very thin-gauge flexible metal foil by hand, with the attendant inconvenience and potential problems of puncturing and tearing that are attendant on working with very thin-gauge, flexible foil.
An additional disadvantage of the disposable pan is that the thin-gauge aluminum that enables low cost and disposability is not strong enough to hold food of more than 20 to 25 pounds. This creates a potentially dangerous situation when the pan is lifted, thus often requiring two persons to lift it, or placing the pan on a portable rigid surface such as a cookie sheet to prevent buckling. In order better to support a heavy food item, pans rely on special reinforcement of pan sides and edges, for example, as provided for in U.S. Pat. No. 4,616,762 to Alexander (1986). But even with crimping to reinforce side walls and strengthening of the rim, pans containing heavy food items must still be placed on possibly heavy rigid sheets to prevent the pan from buckling when lifted. When the pan must be moved, this creates a potential hazard of the pan slipping to the floor, since it is not secured to the rigid sheet.
A further disadvantage of the disposable-pan approach is that because, in order to maintain maximum stability and prevent sliding, the food item must be placed in the pan with its broadest side seated on the bottom of the pan, the disposable pan method does not permit cooking a food product such as a turkey on its side or in the breast-down position, as recommended by various authorities, for example, the popular "Fanny Farmer Cookbook," or "The Joy of Cooking." The latter goes so far as to recommend the off-hand and chancy practice of crushing aluminum foil into balls to wedge along the bottom edge of a turkey if it does not lie stably in a flat-bottom pan.
In addition to the separate disadvantages of the rack-and-pan and the disposable-pan approaches, they share further disadvantages in common. One is the potential of upsetting the pan through the shifting of a heavy food item, with the danger not only of spilling the food item to the floor, but of burning oneself during such an accident. When the pan holding a rack is lifted or tilted, the rack may slide from one position in the holding pan to another. This is even more likely when rack and pan are both treated with non-stick coating, because the coating itself inhibits surface friction, thus facilitating sliding of one such surface, the feet of the rack, on another such surface, the bottom of the pan.
Similarly, food lying free on the bottom of a disposable pan, unconstrained by a rack, may shift or roll any time the pan is lifted or tilted. The danger of upsetting either a pan containing a rack or a disposable pan becomes especially acute when there is a need to baste the food. For purposes of basting, a basting brush can collect accumulated fat and juices and then deposit these on the food. This may require lifting and/or tilting the pan in order to get at these patches of fat and juice or to create a deep pool at one end of the tilted pan, thus incurring the potential of upsetting the pan through the shifting of the rack or the food item itself in the disposable pan.
In an alternate basting method, a device consisting of a hollow-tube with a tapered point and capped by a rubber bulb is used for basting. Squeezing the bulb and slowly releasing it creates a partial vacuum that sucks basting liquids into the tube. Squeezed again, the tube releases its liquids. Since the tube-and-bulb baster has more capacity than a brush, there is a natural desire to use this capacity. The basting tube method entails potential danger in the need to tip the pan significantly in order to create a sufficiently deep pool of liquids to enable one to take advantage of the large capacity of the basting tube. This danger is more pronounced in the case of the disposable pan because of its less rigid structure, which allows for bending and buckling, regardless of structural features designed to avoid this.
Yet another disadvantage common to any method where a pan is used either to contain a rack, or alone, as a disposable pan, is that basting liquids normally spread over the entire bottom surface of the pan. This exposes a maximum surface of the liquid to heat and thus to evaporation, reducing the amount available for basting and exacerbating the problems entailed in basting, as indicated above.
U.S. Pat. No. D359,880 to Fielding and Adams (1995), attempts to solve the basting problem by attaching a conducting channel for fat and cooking liquids to a small basting-well located at one end of a rack. This rack must be placed in a pan, since there is significant overflow beyond the confines of the conducting channel and out of the basting-well itself, leading to a problem of clean-up of both rack and pan. U.S. Pat. No. D359,879 to Fielding and Adams (1995) incorporates a basting-well in the bottom wall of a roasting pan, requiring, however, a doubling of the front, side, and rear walls of the pan in order to accommodate the basting well, thus increasing cost but without providing a true rack-like interior to maintain roasting food elevated well-above run-off fat, nor a basting well deep enough to accommodate run-off fat without significant overflow and thus leading the food item to sit in the overflow, nor, given the requirements of structural integrity of such a construction, disposability.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,878,656 to Fletcher et al. (1999) affords a plurality of separate recesses for collecting run-off fat and cooking liquids in the bottom of the pan, thus making basting a cumbersome process by virtue of the fact that the food item sits directly above the these recesses and must be shifted, lifted, or tilted aside before a brush or basting tube can gain access to the liquids in the recesses. The multiplicity of basting recesses makes cumbersome too pouring off fat and gravy after the food item has been removed from the pan at the end of the cooking process. In sum, both approaches to roasting large food items are fraught with both particular and common disadvantages. No presently available device entailing either the rack-and-pan or disposable-pan approach combines the elements of providing for: a) roasting food to sit well-elevated above run-off fat; b) secure placement of a large food item in any orientation for roasting; c) efficient collection of fat and cooking liquids for basting; d) providing a safe and energy-efficient basting method; and e) disposability. The disclosed invention accumulates the particular advantages of each approach, avoids both the several particular and common disadvantages of the two approaches, and adds advantages available to neither of the two approaches.